This startup helps food carts switch loud, dirty generators for batteries

On a sunny September day in New York City, I followed a throng of people off the subway and into Queens’ Flushing Meadows Corona Park. The crowds were there for the U.S. Open tennis tournament, but I wasn’t — I’d come to see a novel experiment to wean the city’s iconic food carts off dirty generators.

Street vendors in NYC and around the world use fossil-fueled generators that contribute to climate change, can sicken workers, and are just plain noisy. Batteries are a silent, emissions-free alternative, but they represent an upfront cost and introduce logistical challenges around when and where to charge.

So Brooklyn-based startup PopWheels is testing a model that doesn’t require vendors to buy their own batteries, allowing them to instead access swappable batteries throughout the day at nearby charging cabinets. In July, the firm launched a six-month pilot in the Flushing Meadows Corona Park area, installing two black-and-yellow cabinets where the 10 participating vendors can exchange their dead batteries for fresh ones.

Right now, the vendors can access these batteries for free, thanks to $46,000 in grant funding from the City Parks Foundation and another $30,900 from the nonprofit Resilient Cities Catalyst. But PopWheels’ vision is that vendors would eventually pay a monthly subscription fee to use the battery-swapping infrastructure, plus a fee to buy or lease the inverter that houses the batteries in the food cart itself. The firm aims to make the setup price-competitive with the cost of buying and fueling a generator.

“We understand that this only works if we meet not just our green needs but also the economic needs and the logistic needs of these vendors,” said Ben Rosenn, PopWheels’ director of deployments. ​“They’re not going to want to switch if it’s more expensive.”

Scaling the battery-swapping model is not far-fetched. The company already runs a similar program for New York’s delivery workers, charging them between $65 and $95 a month to access batteries for their e-bikes from over 45 cabinets scattered across the city.

“We know that this technology is safe, and it has been used before,” said Isabelle Thomas, policy adviser for living streets and public spaces at the NYC Mayor’s Office of Climate and Environmental Justice, a partner on the PopWheels pilot. ​“It’s just that it hasn’t necessarily been used in this way” for food vendors.

And get this: The batteries used for the e-bikes are the same exact ones that are used for the food carts, meaning that delivery workers and street vendors could eventually take advantage of the same infrastructure. PopWheels has also identified another neat symbiosis in its food-cart pilot, paying some of the delivery workers who already rely on the service to shuttle batteries to street vendors that are farther away from the charging cabinets.

William Arevalo, the owner of the food cart I toured, said that his batteries have worked well so far and that he’d be willing to pay for a subscription to keep using the service. It would likely cost far less than the roughly $500 to $600 a month he pays to fuel his generator, which also requires regular maintenance and repairs. Finances aside, the generator’s noise sometimes makes it hard for customers and workers to hear each other, Arevalo said, and he’s acutely aware of the smoke’s insidious effects.

“Little by little, there can be damage to the lungs,” he said. ​“I have a lot of friends who have this problem.” Though the electrical equipment in Arevalo’s cart now runs on batteries, the grill still uses propane gas.

And, within eyeshot of his battery-powered food cart, which fries up empanadas and other savory dishes, Arevalo operates an ice cream truck that still relies on a diesel-fueled generator. PopWheels’ batteries are not capable of providing enough power for that operation.

“To be honest, right now the technology can’t serve ice cream trucks,” said Rosenn. ​“I don’t think it’s feasible, and you would have to be constantly swapping it.” Electrifying super-energy-intensive vendors would likely require a substantially different battery type and cabinet fleet, according to PopWheels. 

PopWheels’ model isn’t the only option for electrifying food carts. Vendors can purchase their own batteries and charge them up at home or in the commissaries and depots where they park overnight. Arevalo said a friend with a food truck in Brooklyn did that after receiving lots of noise and pollution complaints, switching his generator for a battery he charges at a depot.

But it’s not a given that vendors have access to a space with the electric infrastructure needed to safely charge.

“Every commissary really is different, and some of them have the capacity for there to be charging happening there,” Thomas said. ​“But then there are others that would need electrical upgrades or don’t have enough outlets.”

Batteries also tend to cost more upfront than generators, and vendors must be able to afford a system big enough to get them through the entire day. The nonprofit Street Vendor Project — a partner on the PopWheels effort in Queens — ran a pilot a couple of years ago in which it provided NYC vendors with batteries they were responsible for charging themselves. Given the rules around cart footprints, the organization offered batteries that were around the same physical size as generators, but that capacity was sufficient for fewer vendors than expected, said Andrew Conca-Cheng, programs manager at the Street Vendor Project.

Then there’s the somewhat obvious choice of just letting vendors plug into outlets on the street. Some cities around the world do that, Conca-Cheng said, and a 2013 pilot let a vendor in New York’s Union Square electrify with grid power from a pedestal installed by the startup Simply Grid, but the approach never got much traction. ​“I’ve had people emailing me from Europe saying, ​‘Why isn’t New York doing this yet?’” Conca-Cheng said. ​“And you know, those are the answers we’re looking for, too.” Thomas said in an email that the city is ​“exploring a range of options” and that the grid-power approach ​“has the potential to work especially well in places like parks or plazas.”

Other U.S. cities are also looking to get street vendors off generators. Last summer, D.C. awarded $60,000 to a nonprofit to help four food trucks switch to batteries. Meanwhile, the Regional Air Quality Council in the Denver area offers grants of up to $20,000 to help food trucks electrify.

Conca-Cheng noted the importance of financial assistance in spurring widespread electrification. ​“Vendors are going to need support, whether that be from the city or community banks or whatever. We need ways to finance these,” he said, noting generator buyback programs and low-interest loans as options.

For now, PopWheels and its partner organizations are collecting as much intel as possible from this pilot as they consider expanding the system elsewhere in the city. A top priority is getting the operations side of the model ready to scale, ensuring that the batteries are well maintained and available when needed, and that there’s multilingual support on hand if there are problems with the tech.

“This is kind of like a trust-building exercise with the vendors,” Conca-Cheng said. ​“We’re trying to show them this technology can and will be reliable.”

The company envisions its battery-swapping program expanding for additional use cases — gardeners, facility maintenance workers, and others could all theoretically access distributed energy from the same cabinets. PopWheels could expand geographically, too; it already has cabinets for delivery workers in D.C., Philadelphia, and Toronto that could eventually serve food vendors as well.

Realizing this long-term buildout will take a lot more work and time, but I could see the quieter, cleaner version of New York that the startup is aiming for as I settled down to eat my empanadas at a picnic table next to Arevalo’s battery-powered cart. Instead of the blare of a generator, all I heard was the chirps of birds, the wind in the trees, and the muted chatter of passersby — a relatively rare moment of peace among the din of New York.